"If everyone could clear the room," the Speaker asked, and the Council Members came to their feet, blocking Daniel's view. A doctor hurried through the door and moved toward Jack's table, a syringe in his hand. Teal'c began to move through the milling Standers, and Daniel and Janet followed in his wake. They didn't get far. Their escort appeared before them.
"Please," she said, "if you'd come with me?"
"I'm a doctor...I've been his doctor for years, let me help him?" Janet begged, but she was herded with the rest of them out of the room. They stood in a stunned group in the entrance hall of the building along with the majority of the Councilors. The Standers murmured amongst themselves in small, grim groups of their own. One leaned heavily against the door with tears streaming down his face.
Sam arrived, running and looking much too thin, much too fragile. Daniel thought he might not have known her if he hadn't known she was on the way. She took no notice of any of them, neither did she hear him call her name. She paused only a moment at the door to speak to the man leaning on it.
"Samin," she said. "He won't want you out here reliving it with him again. Go home." But, Samin only shook his head. "Then here," she said and reached into a cloth tied over her shoulder. Only when she awkwardly removed a newborn from it did Daniel realize it was a baby sling. She held the infant out toward the Stander, but he pulled back as though it were a bomb.
"You don't want me to hold him, Major," he said, "Not me."
"Samin," she said weakly.
"I'm sorry," he told her.
"You don't have to feel like this, you have nothing to be sorry for...you were acting under orders. You saved his life." Holding the baby out to him once again, she went on, "Take him...please, you know I can't take him in there. Not if he's back on Torantay." With trembling arms, Samin took the baby. Sam opened the door and slipped through it. Someone was screaming behind it. Daniel had heard Jack being tortured before, heard him cry out with the Goa'uld torture device, and he recognized his cry now.
"What is happening?" Janet demanded of the Councilmen around them.
Speaker Oritz moved forward to speak to them, "The colonel suffers flashbacks to the time of his injury. He is not fully recovered. The meeting went too long. It is difficult for him to be upright for such a long time, and he refuses the pain medication when the Council is in session...he believed the treaty with your world was worth this. I hope he was right," the Councilor ended almost angrily.
After a pause, he continued on in a calmer voice, "Here is your copy of the treaty...there is no need for you to stay."
"We're concerned about Colonel O'Neill," the President said. "We'd like to stay."
The Speaker nodded his head. "The doctors are with him now...he will be fine. But, I understand. You may stay if you wish, though he will probably be too heavily sedated to actually see you again today."
"We understand," the President said. "I'd still like to wait a bit. However, I'm sure several of our group might like to return. Senators, I'd like you to take the treaty and present it to the various committees. And I'm sure the newsmen are eager to get their stories filed and our observers also need to make their reports. Gentlemen, I don't think I need to remind you the story is the treaty...nothing else at this time. Colonel Ramsey and Major Drakel will accompany you through the Gate. The rest of us will be staying awhile." Daniel breathed a sigh of relief to be rid of Kinsey (though finding out just who and what Jack was to the Standers had seemed to effectively silence the man) and admired the President's maneuvering.
The Standers, Daniel presumed, were also free to go about their business, but they stayed. Keeping vigil, he thought. He'd lost track of all the times he'd come to in the infirmary to find Jack dozing or brooding at his bedside. It was fitting they were all there for him now. Not that Jack would appreciate it; he'd hate to have them all seeing him weak and vulnerable and in need of their support.
The doctor came through the door. "It's over," he told the Standers around them. "He's back. I know this is difficult, but he is improving. We were able to avoid sedating him this time...we'll just have to make sure he doesn't pull a stunt like this again."
The Standers somberly nodded in response and began to disperse. Councilor Oritz nodded at the Earthers and said, "If you need anything, just ask anyone. We'll clear out before he knows we were out here...he hates us to hang around." Within a few minutes, virtually all the Standers were gone.
General Hammond approached Samin, "This must be Major Carter's baby."
"Yes," the Stander told him, turning the baby so the general could see him.
"A fine boy," the general said.
"Yes, a fine boy," Samin repeated.
"You were there then, when Colonel O'Neill was wounded?"
The Stander hung his head and his answer was little more than a whisper, "I was."
"I was his commanding officer for years. I still feel responsible for him. Can you tell me what happened?"
Samin shook his head. A tear fell on the baby's forehead and he wrinkled his little face up and wiggled before settling back to sleep. An awkward silence descended on the group, and then George opened the door. The old man paused upon seeing them and frowned.
"I said he wouldn't be up for a visit this evening, now didn't I? And no thanks to you and your long-winded ways. Why are you hanging around?" he didn't wait for an answer but turned to Samin. "They're wanting the baby."
Samin held the baby out to him. "You're not wanting to bring him in yourself, then?" George asked him. "Wouldn't hurt you to see him now." Samin shook his head, and George accepted the baby. As he headed back into the Council Chambers, he gave the group from Earth a disgruntled look. "I'll tell the major you are out here..." he said as the door shut behind him.
The next time it opened, it was for a tall, friendly man who smiled warmly at them before saying, "Major Carter asked that I see to you. They're taking the colonel home now...she'd be pleased if you could join them there. If you have to return to Earth, she understands and hopes you will be able to return another day."
"Is it far?" the President asked. "I've a cabinet meeting I really shouldn't miss but had hoped to speak a moment to Colonel...or I guess that's President O'Neill, isn't it?"
"He prefers Colonel, but either title is correct. The O'Neill's are housed on Danara for now...just a trip through the StarGate." The President glanced at the commander of his Secret Service Agents who emphatically shook his head no.
"I'm afraid I'd be pushing my luck too far to talk these fellows into letting me loose on another world...I probably should take my shadows and go home. If you'd just tell the Pres-Colonel I meant what I said in the meeting-he's clear of all charges and welcome home any time he chooses to return."
"He won't. He's a Stander now, but I'll see he gets the message," the man said and ushered them all to the StarGate. Once again there wasn't time to really see the monuments, but Daniel drank in all he could. Many of them were carved images of various worlds or groups of worlds. Engravings recorded the price each world had paid to be freed from the tyranny of the Aschen.
Atal. Fell without a fight and without bloodshed in the First Wave of the Rebellion. 7,428 Atali recruits were sent to the Training Fields on Danara. 5,092 were lost on the Battlefields.
Earth. The planet that sparked the Rebellion. As far as is known, she fell without bloodshed.
Trytharanith. 3,987 fell to free Trytharanith from the Aschen in the Second Wave of the Rebellion. She gave 17 recruits to the cause, 15 did not return.
Hakter. All the Aschen in the galaxy were driven to the beaches of Hakter where they made their own stand against the Standers' Army. Here the Colonel fell and thousands upon thousands with him. They cut us down like wheat before the sickle, yet we prevailed.
Daniel blinked at that one...they'd been told Jack had been injured on Torantay not Hakter. "Isn't there a monument for Torantay?" he asked their guide.
"No. The wounds of Torantay are too fresh." The man pointed toward an area along the path without any statue or plaque. "When the healing is over it will be set there, but until then..."
"What happened?"
"It was Hakter all over again. But without the Asgard to heal the casualties afterwards. 15,000 went in...107 walked out on the own leaving more dead behind them than the living. That alone was enough to make men weep at the mention of Torantay, but it was only the beginning. When the battle was over...reinforcements arrived but they didn't realize until too late the DHD had been hit and they couldn't bring the wounded back to Danara. Worse, we didn't know...we thought the Asgard-we should have sent help right away, but we didn't know. They were lying there all through the night, waiting on us to come for them." The man fought back tears, and Daniel wished he hadn't asked. The wounds, he thought, might always be too fresh for Torantay.
Janet, though, needing to know what had happened to the colonel pushed on. "Exactly what type of injury did Colonel O'Neill receive there?"
The Stander shook his head. "He wasn't even there for the Battle...he led the reinforcements on to Torantay, but the CAAD had already been set. The Battle was over. The Asgard had patched him back together after Hakter...he should have been fine. But, we...we didn't come. An unexploded bomb...that's what took him out, an unexploded bomb hours after the War was over. It shouldn't have happened. We should have come. He gave up everything to fight the Standers' War, the Major, too, and we left them both lying on Torantay through the Long Night."
"Major Carter was injured on Torantay as well?" Janet broke in.
"Major Carter led the charge after the Colonel fell at Hakter. There was no one else..."
"I see," Janet said faintly. It was too late to be upset about it now. They'd seen Sam only briefly, but obviously she had survived whatever injuries she'd sustained. Janet had been too worried about Jack to really look at the baby, but he'd been healthy enough from the looks of it.
Daniel had expected something exotic from the planet with the blue stone monument back on Eonal, but the area around the Gate was far from it.
They'd stepped out into a cross between an army base and a hospital compound. Practical, ugly buildings connected by dirt paths lined with signs pointing off in all directions: Training Grounds, Rehab Building Three, Main Hospital, Research Lab, Requisitions, Prosthetics Lab, Technical Institute, Weapons Development, and on they went. Their guide motioned them down a path following an arrow towards Barracks # 1.
"This is my world," he told them. "The area around our StarGate was a beautiful park which is how we had room to build the Training Facilities for the Army so close to the Gate. When they have moved onto their own worlds, we will tear this all down and reseed the park. Almost, I wish we wouldn't. It will be beautiful with the trees and flowers, but this, this is beautiful, too."
They all looked at him incredulously, and he explained, "Whatever else we do, what we were able to do for the Standers will always be a testimony that once we were a people of which we could be proud, once we looked outside ourselves and did something great."
They reached their destination, and he ushered them in. The barracks were as ugly as any on Earth and, in fact, looked remarkably similar. They were ushered to an apartment on the first floor and shown into the small, cramped living room. Through an open door they could see a hospital bed with crumpled blankets at its foot and a wheelchair at its side. Their guide stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him. They could hear low murmurs and the occasional word through the thin walls.
The group crowded onto the few pieces of furniture around the living room and leaned against the walls wherever they could find room. A bathroom opened up off to one side and a closet another. There was no kitchen, but a small hot pot and what was possibly a Danarian coffee pot set on a small refrigerator pushed against the wall. A stack of diapers was falling over next to a used coffee cup, a pile of student notebooks, several technical drawings, and a yo-yo on the low table in front of the couch.
Their guide rejoined them. "The major will be out in a minute," he said and left them to their silent appraisal of the O'Neills' quarters. In one corner of the room, a model Air Force jet swung from the roof, a souvenir Jack must have carried away with him. The lone window opened up to face another squat building and nothing else. The only pictures on the wall were close-ups of the baby. Looking at them, Daniel realized they didn't know his name. He couldn't see either Sam or Jack in his red, scrunched up face. He had a head of light brown hair and blue eyes, but then, didn't all newborns have blue eyes?
Out of curiosity he opened the refrigerator and found some bottles of water, a bowl of blue Jell-O and what was apparently left of the stash he and Teal'c had packed for Sam when she'd visited the SGC: three Snickers, two more boxes of Jell-O, and a small can of coffee. He glanced around for the Fruit Loops but didn't spot them. We should have brought more, he thought idly when raised voices from the bedroom caught his attention, and that of everyone else.
"I don't want her in here, Carter! Not like this!" It was the first they'd heard from Jack since the Council Chambers. It appeared he'd regained his strength.
The thin walls let them hear most of the conversation.
"Then it's the hospital...Janet can...take care...in what 10 minutes? ...the doctors at the hospital...won't touch...the OR and we'll spend the night in recovery and they'll be gone before you're released!"
"George can do it!"
"Nope, nope, nope, Colonel," came the old man's voice, "I've done what I can...you had no business wearing those things all day and sitting up like that! What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking of saving a few worlds! That's what!"
"Well, see what you get for thinking," George retorted.
"Oh, just get out...if you're not going to help, go!" Jack snarled in return.
"All right, I will!" The door banged opened and shut. George huffed through the room, and the front door slammed behind him like an angry echo. In its wake, the baby fussed on the other side of the wall.
Jack gave a disgusted growl. A moment later Sam stuck her head around the door.
"Hi, guys. Sorry about that. He'll be back. Janet, is there any way I could ask you to take a look at the colonel?"
"Of course. I don't have any equipment with me..."
"It's ok. George keeps a supply on hand...we have everything you'll need."
The colonel was sitting on edge of the bed facing away from them as they entered the room. A swing bar hung over the bed, a bowl of water and a handful of rags lay on the bed beside him to his left, and the baby squirmed beside him. Janet had to squeeze past the wheelchair to reach him, but it wasn't until she crossed to his side of the bed that Janet realized the extent of the damage.
She knew he didn't want her to see him like this. And she didn't want to see him this way either. After all her years of medical training, she still found it hard not to stare. This wasn't just a patient; after four years of working with him he was much more than that. She tore her eyes from his stumps up to his face. He gave her an apologetic grimace. "Doc," he said in greeting.
She cleared her throat, "What seems to be the problem, Colonel?"
"Bone fragment-there," he pointed to a bleeding sore. She carefully cleared away the oozing blood to reveal the white sheen of bone working its way through his skin. "I could have pulled it out myself, but Carter here..." He scowled at Sam but she wouldn't look up to see it.
"I think Sam might have been right, Sir. It looks like it's probably thicker under the skin."
"Always are," he said. "But go for it...yank it out of there. I just got a dose of painkiller, there won't be a better time."
"Is any of this analgesic?" she asked poking around among the unfamiliar tubes and prepared syringes in the kit Sam handed her.
"Oh, for crying out loud, just pull it!" Janet gritted her teeth and carefully worked the fragment out ignoring his occasional hiss of pain. The exit point was larger than she was willing to leave without stitches, though he had several abrasions and cuts on the stump already from the prosthetic. She carefully began stitching him up.
While she worked, Sam sat beside him and nursed the baby. Their previous angry words still hung in the air between the two of them like poison gas. The sight of them sitting like shadows of the officers she'd known back at the SGC made Janet want to cry. They were both too pale, too thin, too obviously worn down. They didn't look like the heroes of 46 worlds.
"I don't suppose either of you want to tell me what happened?" No. "Then tell me about the baby...he looks great. Everything went all right?"
"Just fine," Sam said.
"And?" Janet prompted...maybe she should have been a dentist, getting anything out of these two was like pulling teeth.
Sam brought the baby up to her shoulder and gently burped him. "7 pounds, almost 21 inches, nurses great, and even sleeps a good part of the night..." There was an awkwardness to Sam's handling of the baby that at first Janet had attributed to her being a new mother, but the more she watched, the more Janet knew it was something more.
"What's up with the shoulder, Sam?" she asked.
"Broke a few bones...it's mending."
"Is it?" Janet's tone clearly implied she had doubts about the medical care they'd been receiving, but neither of them answered it. "How long have you been fitted for the prosthetics?" she asked Jack.
"A while," he shrugged.
"This should be toughening up better than it is...it looks too raw."
"Well, this is what we've got to work with."
"The other's just as bad?"
"Yeah."
"I'm guessing you lost a good deal of blood?"
"Um."
"It's been what? 11 weeks?" He shrugged in answer. "Your body is still trying to replace the blood loss...you need to get that built up before you're going to see healing like you need to wear the prosthetics easily."
"Yeah, well, seems we're fresh out of compatible blood, but don't worry, Doc...I've been eating my spinach."
She ignored his pathetic excuse for a joke. "This has had to really put a strain on your heart and other organs...I'd like you to come to Earth and let me see what we can do. I'd like both of you to come and let me take a look."
Sam murmured, "I'm fine," and he said, "We're kind of busy here."
"Well, when you go into heart fail-"
"Enough! See why I didn't want her back here?" he growled at Sam. "Come on, finish up. Let's go get something to eat."
Janet carefully washed and wrapped the stump. She looked around for the prosthetics, but when he saw her looking, Jack said, "Just the chair." She wheeled it close and watched him try to hoist himself in to it. He was weaker than he wanted to admit; both she and Sam had to help move him over. He sat trembling from the effort while Sam calmly worked the soft material of his pants over and around his stumps. He ran a shaky hand through his hair and wheeled himself to the door.
"O'Neill," Teal'c acknowledged painfully.
"Hey, Teal'c," O'Neill met his gaze and then that of the others.
"Jack," Daniel started but couldn't finish.
"It's me, guys, relax," Jack ordered gruffly. "You get used to it after awhile...take your time."
"I'm sorry," Daniel stammered. "I..I..had no idea...I thought you'd just, I don't know-bummed up your knee again or something."
"Oh, I think I did that all right," Jack answered him dryly.
"What happened?"
"War, Daniel...you know, what we were fighting when you were making nice with the enemy."
"Colonel!" Sam reprimanded him.
"Sorry, Daniel. I know we owe you..." Daniel knew with the whole room watching their interchange he wouldn't go into more detail. He'd fought their battle for them on Earth, but Jack couldn't know whether the general was aware of that fact or whether he'd applaud him or court-martial him. He was probably just lucky they hadn't had his name on a plague back on Eonal for all to see.
"No, Jack, you're right. We should have believed you; you shouldn't have been out here fighting without us. Maybe we would have made the difference... maybe..."
Jack shrugged. "There are always 'maybes' but you can't go back and change the way things happened. The Aschen are history, the war's over, Earth still has a future, and today you helped buy us some more time to salvage ours."
"Yours, Colonel?" the general asked. "Does that mean you no longer consider yourself one of us? The President has cleared you-you're free to come home anytime you want."
Jack frowned. "I walked away from Earth to save it. In doing so I made a commitment to these people. I won't go back on it. I'll always consider Earth my home, but I won't be coming back." There was a finality in his words that silenced the room except for the baby hiccoughing in Sam's arms.
"And you, Major Carter?" Hammond asked.
Jack looked at her, his anger fading away like raindrops on a hot sidewalk. She made it too easy for him to take advantage of her, to take her for granted, to just assume she'd always be there. He knew the doctors weren't happy with her recovery even yet. They watched her like a hawk and kept scheduling tests she kept avoiding. Even so, he kept leaning on her. Because he didn't have a leg of his own to stand on. Because he needed her. Because to not was to acknowledge the doctors' fears and his own.
She was a rock he leaned on, and it was rare he felt her give way beneath his weight. But, she'd given way today in the Council Chambers. When he'd fought his way back to Eonal, she'd been there like always. But, not at his side. Across the room, curled in the corner. Panic and pain emanating from her. He'd met her eyes and said, "Kinsey's been here...we'll have to fumigate." She had laughed in spite of herself and they had acted as if nothing had happened. But, it had.
She'd been lecturing everyday all day at the Institute or working in the Research labs and then scrambling to find time and energy for PT in the evenings on top of nursing the baby and caring for the two of them. He'd seen the tears of exhaustion she couldn't hide. She hadn't lied when she said the baby slept a good part of the night...he was the only one though. He wouldn't blame her if she packed it up and went home. But he knew what she would say before she said it.
"I Stand with the colonel," she said without hesitation or apology. Then she grinned at him and said, "We've got a good thing going here." He grinned back. She was the best thing he had going for him. He'd have to find a way to take better care of her.
"I understand," the general said. "You've done yourself proud here. Both of you. But, you can't blame us for trying...you're greatly missed."
"Thank you, Sir. We appreciate that," Sam told him. He stood and gave her a hug.
"Have you heard from my dad, Sir?" she asked hopefully.
He shook his head. "The Tok'ra have made themselves scarce lately. I'm sorry. I'll tell him how to contact you when I do." She bit her lip and nodded her acceptance of his offer. "He'll want to see this grandson of his," the general said, taking the baby from Sam. "What do you call him?"
"CJ," Jack said.
"Chance. Chance Jacob," Sam clarified.
"We would have gone with 'George', but I'd already given it away to someone else," Jack quipped.
"I think we've met him," the general laughed. "I hope you didn't give him my name because he reminded you of me."
"No, Sir," Jack said quickly.
"Come on, Jack, admit it. It was the hair-or lack of it."
Jack changed the subject while the others snickered. "I, for one, am ready for supper..."